Tag: middle-east

The tale of a Saudi-Israeli normalisation and the reality of the Saudi-Iranian rapprochement

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Chief of staff of Saudi Arabia’s armed forces Fayyad Al-Ruwaili meets his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Bagheri in Tehran to discuss defence ties, November 10.

by Michael Karadjis

Global media:

2005: “Israel and Saudi Arabia are approaching the establishment of diplomatic relations to counter Iran.”

2010: “Israel and Saudi Arabia are approaching the establishment of diplomatic relations to counter Iran.”

2012: “Israel and Saudi Arabia are approaching the establishment of diplomatic relations to counter Iran.”

2015: “Israel and Saudi Arabia are approaching the establishment of diplomatic relations to counter Iran.”

2017: “Israel and Saudi Arabia are approaching the establishment of diplomatic relations to counter Iran.”

2020: “Israel and Saudi Arabia are approaching the establishment of diplomatic relations to counter Iran.”

2022: “Israel and Saudi Arabia are approaching the establishment of diplomatic relations to counter Iran.”

And then …

March 2023: Saudi Arabia and Iran restore diplomatic relations, under Chinese auspices (still no sign of these famous Saudi-Israel relations)

After this: Ongoing Saudi-Israel normalisation discussions via the US: while Israel ruled by the most right-wing regime ever which would never even consider a Palestinian state, this is Saudi Arabia’s absolute condition for normalisation:

June 13, 2023: Saudi Arabia: Normalisation with Israel based on 2002 Arab Plan for full Israeli withdrawal to 1967 borders and establishment of Palestinian state “still on the table”:

Fahad Nazer, chief spokesman of the Saudi Embassy in Washington: “Saudi Arabia’s position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been clear and has been consistent for many years. In fact, it was the late King Abdullah, who, way back in 2002, introduced what is now known as the Arab Peace Initiative at the Arab League Summit in Beirut in that year. And the proposal, the initiative, does offer Israel normalization with all members of the Arab states in return for a just and comprehensive peace with the Palestinians based on a two-state solution … that offer really still remains on the table,” the core issue of Palestinian rights is still a must before normalization can truly continue.

August 14, 2023: Saudi Arabia appoints ambassador to State of Palestine and attempts to put office in East Jerusalem (which is prevented by Israel):

Saudi Arabia has given its ambassador to Jordan, Nayef al-Sudairi, an extra portfolio of ambassador to Palestine in East Jerusalem. “He presented his credentials to Majid al-Khalidi, an adviser to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. The Saudis did not coordinate this appointment with the Israelis … The Saudis may have hoped to open a consulate in East Jerusalem, but the current extremist government of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu truculently batted away any such prospect, saying that al-Sudairi may meet as he pleases with officials of the Palestinian Authority, but he may not have an office in East Jerusalem.

Yes, with occasional vague statements meant such as MBS’ September 20 statement that “Every day, we get closer” to an agreement with Israel, as long as we “solve” the Palestinian issue in a way that “will ease the life of the Palestinians,” which has been widely cited to mean the above conditions were dropped. No doubt aimed at ‘testing the waters’ for betrayal. Yet same conditions re-stated firmly within days:

September 26, 2023: Saudi Arabia: 2002 Arab Peace Initiative for Palestinian state fundamental pillar of any agreement with Israel

Saudi ambassador to Jordan and Palestine, Nayef Al-Sudairi, told reporters in Ramallah his visit “reaffirms that the Palestinian cause and Palestine and the people of Palestine are of high and important status and that in the coming days there will be a chance for a bigger cooperation between Saudi Arabia and the state of Palestine. … the Arab initiative, which Saudi Arabia presented in 2002, is a fundamental pillar of any upcoming agreement.”

All the above was before October 7, 2023, which much fanfare has claimed hardened the Saudi position and prevented an alleged “imminent” Saudi-Israel normalisation. Statements afterwards may appear harder, but are fundamentally similar to those before; the idea of “imminence” seems highly questionable:

February 6, 2024: Saudi Arabia: No diplomatic relations with Israel without Palestinian state on 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital:

Blinken: To normalise with Israel, Saudi Arabia requires “a clear, credible, time-bound path to the establishment of a Palestinian state.” Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs: There has been a “clear, credible, time-bound path to the establishment of a Palestinian state” for the past 30 years, called the Oslo Accords, which however has gone nowhere. “The Kingdom has communicated its firm position to the U.S. administration that there will be no diplomatic relations with Israel unless an independent Palestinian state is recognised on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital.”

March 3 2024: Saudi Arabia Refuses to Allow US Fighter Jets Airspace Access to strike Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen

May 7, 2024: Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs renews “the Kingdom’s demand for the international community to intervene immediately to stop the genocide being carried out by the occupation forces against defenceless civilians in the occupied Palestinian territories.”

September 27 2024: Saudi Arabia announces new global coalition to establish Palestinian state:

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman: “The Kingdom will not stop its tireless work towards the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, and we affirm that the Kingdom will not establish diplomatic relations with Israel without that.”

16 October, 2024: Saudi Arabia wants to permanently close chapter on differences with Iran:

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian: Islamic countries, including Saudi Arabia are “our brothers.” Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan: Saudi Arabia seeks to “permanently close the chapter on our differences [with Iran] and focus on resolving issues, developing relations as two friendly and brotherly countries”

October 19-20: Joint Saudi-Iranian naval exercises

“The Royal Saudi Naval Forces had recently concluded a joint naval exercise with the Iranian Naval Forces alongside other countries in the Sea of Oman,” said Brigadier General Turki al-Malki, spokesperson for the Saudi defence ministry (the other countries included Russia, Oman, India, Thailand, Pakistan, Qatar, and Bangladesh), and the two countries are planning to hold their own joint exercise in the Red Sea region.

October 26, 2024: Saudi Arabia condemns Israel’s attack on Iran as a “violation of its sovereignty” and international laws

October 31, 2024: Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister: No normalization with Israel without Palestinian state.

November 10 2024: Fayyad al-Ruwaili, chief of staff of the Saudi armed forces, met his Iranian counterpart General Mohammad Bagheri at the Iranian Armed Forces General Staff Headquarters in Tehran to increase ‘security cooperation.

November 11, 2024: Saudi Arabia denounces ‘genocide’ committed by Israel at Arab League and the Organisation of Islamic Conference which it organised:

Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammed bin Salman at joint summit of the Arab League and the Organisation of Islamic Conference in Riyadh: “The kingdom reiterates its denunciation of the genocide perpetrated by Israel against the brotherly Palestinian people, which resulted in more than 150,000 martyrs, wounded and missing, the majority of whom are women and children … and the extension of aggressions on the brotherly Republic of Lebanon.”

November 11, 2024: Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at same summit: the international community should oblige Israel “to respect the sovereignty of the sisterly Islamic Republic of Iran and not to violate its lands”.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman meets with Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Aug. 18, 2023.

But what does all this mean?

A point of clarification: in outlining the plain facts of the matter above, I am not even remotely trying to put a good face on the uber-repressive Saudi monarchy, and still less the ‘modernising’ tyrant Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), who, as anyone who understands his politics knows, would probably sell his mother for any dirty deal with anyone if he thought he could get away with it. Principles simply don’t come into it with MBS. There are even rumours – denied by the Saudis – that MBS secretly met Netanyahu with American officials in Saudi Arabia in 2020, though nothing came of it.

In any case, since I am pointing to the growing Saudi-Iranian convergence, one might say that is not much better. The Iranian regime, for example, played a key role alongside Russian imperialism in drowning Syria in the blood of hundreds of thousands to keep the Assad family dictatorship in power, uprooting half the Syrian population; almost a third of Syrians remain in exile in the world’s largest ‘Nakbah’. But then, even that point falls flat because the Saudi monarchy is hardly better with its own multi-year barbaric air war in Yemen which has likewise led to hundreds of thousands of deaths; Saudi Arabia and Iran – both highly repressive, theocratic and misogynist regimes – suit each other, and suit Israel – so to be clear, we are talking here about interests, not principles or who is ‘better’.

In other words, good they are not warring with each other, but nothing to celebrate either: the Saudi-Iran convergence is a new counterrevolutionary alliance formed on the grave of the Arab Spring revolutions, which they both actively participated in drowning in blood.

Likewise, speaking of interests, I am not doubting that the Saudi ruling class can see great benefits of normalising with Israel, the wealthiest, most technologically advanced capitalist state in the region. The Saudis’ massive ‘Vision 2020’ modernising project can greatly benefit from Israeli trade and technology; and likewise the Saudi repressive forces can benefit from Israeli weapons technology, surveillance equipment and so on – which Arab ruling classes wouldn’t? And one widely touted impetus, the proposed India– Middle East–Europe Corridor’ (IMEC) – would bring significant infrastructure development to Saudi Arabia, yet virtually implies Saudi-Israeli normalisation, at least de facto.

Abraham Accords: Why not Saudis?

However, there are good reasons why some Arab ruling classes have normalised with Israel – Egypt in 1978, Jordan in 1994, then UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco in the Abraham Accords of 2010, and, effectively, Oman – while the majority, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya and Algeria – have not. Despite the fact that those who have normalised are more or less ‘Saudi allies’ in a loose sense, Saudi Arabia did not join the Abraham Accords. These accords gave Israel recognition from these states while the Palestinians got nothing in return. Why can’t Saudi Arabia do the same?

Principally, because Saudi Arabia is not just any Arab country, but the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques of Mecca & Medina, and a state which projects itself as head of the entire Sunni Muslim world – these two related facts are central to the very legitimacy of the Saudi state. It would be no small thing for this state to recognise Israel while Jerusalem of all places, where the third Holy Mosque is located, remains under Israeli occupation; in fact the two things are virtually irreconcilable. Additionally, the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative for a sovereign Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital was precisely a Saudi initiative, signed in Riyadh; it is known interchangeably as the Saudi Peace Plan and so betrayal would in effect be a blow to its own prestige.

And this Saudi raison d’etre goes well beyond the autocratic regime. According to a report in The Atlantic, MBS told US State Secretary Blinken back in January that he “personally doesn’t care” about Palestine, but his people do – indeed, 96 percent of Saudis are opposed to normalising with Israel and believe those Arab states that have established ties should sever them. MBS was not kidding when he said that he does not want to end up like Jordanian King Abdullah I, assassinated in 1951, or Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, assassinated in 1981, in both cases for betrayal of Palestine.

The point here is not that Saudi Arabia is about to put up any active “resistance” to Israel’s ongoing occupation and genocide, but rather that official symbolism can be as necessary for regime survival as it is meaningless in practice. After all, the Iranian regime, which preaches “death to Israel” rhetoric, has offered no more “resistance” in practice to the Gaza genocide than have the Saudis; indeed the Iranian regime didn’t even lift a finger to assist its own proxy, Hezbollah, when it came under existential Israeli attack in October. So pointing out that a Saudi-Israeli deal is mostly in the realm of fantasy has nothing to do with illusions that the Saudi regime might actually do something to help Palestine. 

The differing bases of Saudi-Iranian and Israeli-Iranian conflict

Meanwhile, the motivations for Saudi Arabia to push on with its detente with Iran are just as compelling as are those for detente with Israel, but currently without the same dangers. Indeed, if regional stability is essential for MBS’ Vision 2030 transformation project, then establishing relative peace with Iran is just as important as with Israel. Indeed, at this particular juncture, it is not hard to see that Israel’s actions are vastly more destabilising to the region than are Iran’s, which may have been different a decade ago. Moreover, despite the potential benefits of IMEC, the project may take decades to complete, and meanwhile Saudi Arabia can also see benefits of economic expansion into the Iran-Iraq-Syria space.

Far from being a US ‘proxy’ as sometimes depicted, the sub-imperial Saudi regime has built powerful political and economic relations with both Russia and China. Its partnership with Russia in OPEC+ goes back to 2016, as the two major oil exporters have coordinated on global supply and price issues; and just before this, Saudi Arabia’s flooding of the world oil market to force down prices is widely viewed as being aimed at US shale oil, as the US now joined these states as a major oil exporter and hence competitor for the first time; the Saudis again attacked US shale oil with an engineered price collapse in 2020. In contrast, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and US attempts to sanction Russia, the Saudis have snubbed Washington’s entreaties to increase supply; continual Saudi-Russian agreements to reduce supply, thus keeping prices high, have helped bankroll the Russian war. Meanwhile, following Chinese leader Xi’s lavish welcome in Riyadh in late 2022, where the two countries signed a “comprehensive strategic partnership agreement” and Chinese and Saudi firms signed 34 investment deals, Saudi-Chinese economic relations have boomed; these agreements partially align Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 with China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The Saudis have even agreed to trade oil to China in renminbi rather than the dollar – a potential future hole in the historic ‘petrodollar’ hegemony – although this has not proceeded very far yet. Saudi Arabia’s main ‘ally’ in terms of arms provision remains the US, of course, but it clearly has no interest in being boxed in by one potential future project, still less one imaginary ‘camp’; ‘proxy’ it definitely is not.

The ironic thing about the Israel-Iran tension escalating while the Saudi-Iran tension eases is that it is precisely the Saudi-Iran tension that had a real material reality, based on actual rivalry for domination of the Arab-Muslim region between these two sub-imperial giants. Their geopolitical/sectarian-coloured rivalry, which took on an active form in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen in particular, was aimed at gaining a larger sphere of influence within the region for one or the other, which potentially meant more trade, more investment, more goods sold, more economic deals and links, more profit. Erdogan’s Turkey, using the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood as his tool, was the third sub-imperial rival of both. In addition, Saudi Arabia and Iran are both major oil exporters, and therefore rivals in this sphere as well – and rivals of both the US and Russia. As such, historic US sanctions on Iran, regardless of motivation, have benefited Saudi Arabia – and Russia.

The Israel-Iran hostility, by contrast, has no such basis, as Israel has zero potential for either popular legitimacy or even any serious economic penetration in that region (as I have explained in detail here); while high-tech Israeli capitalism is spread far and wide throughout the rest of the world, it is effectively locked out of this region, widely hated by the people, with very little trade taking place even with countries like Egypt and Jordan that normalised with it decades ago. It is not an oil competitor with Iran or Saudi Arabia, and neither country sells it anything (Israel’s oil mostly comes from Azerbaijan, Kazakhistan and Russia). But state regimes also have to maintain support of their own populations, or at least consensus to rule; and this is achieved through hegemonic ideologies which can be based on ‘nation’, ‘race’, religion or other ideologies, which can take on a life of their own and not always correspond neatly to economic interests abroad.

As such, the more symbolic Israel-Iran ‘conflict’ is rooted in hegemonic mobilisation: the Zionist and Iranian ethno-theocratic projects both need the “great enemy” of each other to justify themselves. The Iranian “threat” to Israel – whether in its “liberatory” face projected by the Iran-led so-called “resistance axis,” or its expansionist-genocidal face projected by Israel – is an entirely manufactured promise/threat, but the need for such a major “threat” is crucial to the ideological foundations of the late Zionist state, as it is likewise to the ‘Islamic Republic’ state, especially for influence in the mostly Sunni Arab region where it is somewhat of an outlier as a Persian-based and Shiite regime. Importantly, this great ideological ‘enmity’ is mediated by safe geographic distance.

Saudi motivations for Iran detente: Mutual exhaustion in rivalry

The reason for the Saudi-Iranian détente derives from the same material reality as did their regional rivalry; it reflects mutual exhaustion and the desire to now get on with peaceful capitalist expansion within the spheres of influence their decade of rivalry has defined. On Syria, Saudi Arabia effectively gave up its attempt to influence the anti-Assad uprising soon after it launched its bloody intervention in Yemen in 2015, and Russia likewise launched its  bloody intervention to save Assad the same year, which Saudi leader MBS silently supported; the Saudis had been motivated more by rivalry with Iran, which backed Assad, and also with the Qatar-Turkey-Muslim Brotherhood axis, which backed the anti-Assad uprising, than genuine opposition to Assad, so Russia’s intervention to save Assad was seen as a means to getting an Assad regime less dominated by Iran – MBS’ secret support to Russian intervention thus coincided with the open support given to it by Israel, Egypt, the UAE, Jordan and Bahrain.

While the centre of their ‘hot’ rivalry then turned to Yemen, by 2022, both the 7-year Houthi attempt to conquer southern and eastern Yemen, and the Saudi attempt to reconquer northwest Yemen from the Houthis, had come to nothing, as the different governing bodies held on where they had their bases of support. This led to the ceasefire which has held from early 2022 to the present, and the Saudis have no interest in reigniting the war.

As for Iraq, there we have a regime dominated by Iranian-allied parties, where the Iranian-backed Shiite militia under the Popular Mobilisation Units (PMU) umbrella are part of the Iraqi armed forces, yet which withdrew its ambassador from Iran, and filed a complaint with the UN Security Council, when Iran attacked the Iraqi Kurdish region in January 2024, which just signed a defence pact with Saudi Arabia, and which still has US occupation troops on its soil and is an official out-of-area ‘NATO-partner’! A true joint-venture state! And since Iranian rivalry was the only real problem the Saudis had with Assad, patching it up with Iran also allowed them to join their Abraham Accords allies – who had re-established relations with Assad at much the same time they did with Israel – in re-establishing relations with the Assad regime and inviting Assad to the 2024 Arab League summit. Also worth noting is that the Arab League, led by Saudi Arabia, dropped its characterisation of Hezbollah as a “terrorist” entity in 2024.

It is interesting that their ‘hot’ rivalry coincided with the ‘hot’ period of the Arab Spring revolutionary uprisings. While Iran played the key role in smashing it in Syria and Iraq, Saudi Arabia the main role in Bahrain and Egypt, and both played awful roles in Yemen and Sudan (yet both, ironically, supported the overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya), they also both used the ferment to attempt to co-opt forces inimical to the other and compete in arming fellow tyrants to bend to their side in their rivalry. One may expect that the crushing of Spring would exacerbate rivalries, because what they had in common – hatred of popular revolt – had been put down. Yet in fact, the crushing of Spring also coincided with both the mutual exhaustion of their rivalry, and hence a counterrevolutionary convergence could be formed over the graves of hundreds of thousands of Arabs they buried.

This Saudi-Iranian détente may involve other areas of convergence, given the rise of new sub-imperial rivals, above all the Saudis’ erstwhile UAE ‘allies’ who have now become important rivals, who for example back a south Yemeni secessionist movement against the Saudi-backed Yemeni government! Likewise, Saudi-UAE rivalry has also peaked in the Sudanese civil war where they have emerged on opposite sides. Iran has begun supplying arms to the repressive Sudanese military regime, engulfed in horrific conflict with its former ally, the paramilitary RSF, which is engaged in the genocidal subjugation of Darfur. While the UAE has been arming the RSF (in alliance with Russia and its Wagner mercenary force), its erstwhile Saudi and Egyptian allies, like Iran, support the regime. Now Iranian planes bringing arms to Sudan fly through Saudi airspace! To throw even further earth into the grave of ‘campist’ analysis, the Sudanese regime – before the split between military and RSF – was also a signatory to the Abraham Accords with Israel!

To be clear: Saudi Arabia’s dedication to its new convergence with Iran does not in itself reduce its motivation to normalise with Israel, if Israel were ever to concede on the Palestinian state; on the contrary, creating ‘peace’ with both would seen by the Saudi rulers as the ultimate measure of their regional power. Yet this is precisely where Israel’s more symbolic, ideological mobilizational conflict with Iran becomes more intense: the idea that there can be peaceful coexistence with Iran, depicted as some kind of ‘Fourth Reich’ by Israel, cuts directly across this ideological picture. Furthermore, even though Israel cannot hope for any major economic penetration into the region as explained above, by drumming up the Iranian “threat,” Israel’s major military and “security” industries aim to profit via cooperation with the military and repressive forces of the Gulf regimes, including Saudi Arabia; Saudi/Gulf détente with Iran is not good for Israeli business.

Will this change with Trump?

All that said, it is not out of the question for things to change again – much speculation concerns the difference the newly elected Trump regime in the US will make. It has been pointed out that MBS was on better terms with Trump than with Biden, who in the beginning aimed to ‘shun’ Saudi Arabia’s viciously anti-democratic rulers, whereas Trump never made any pretences over ‘human rights’ concerns; and that the Abraham Accords were Trump’s legacy, so he may try to continue them with a vengeance.

However, Biden dropped all that ‘shunning’ stuff once he decided that extending the Abraham Accords to Saudi Arabia would become his legacy. And what conditioned his failure – an extremist Israeli government officially opposed to any concept of Palestinian state, combined with such a state being the key Saudi condition – remains the same under Trump. Even more, in fact, given that the Trump regime is essentially ideologically identical to the Netanyahu regime on the question of Israeli annexation of the West Bank – Biden at least made nods towards the ‘two-state’ concept. How would the Saudis reconcile recognising Israel with the politics of Trump’s Christian fundamentalist-messianic Zionist ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee – who believes there is no such thing as a Palestinian, and no such things as the West Bank – not to mention the rest of Trump’s assemblage of the most pro-Zionist administration in US history?  

So Trump would have a job on his hands trying to push Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords, no matter how chummy he may be with MBS. Could he perhaps bribe MBS with enough money and weapons and promises of a ‘US security pact’ to convince him to recognise Israel with no Palestinian state and put his regime and life at risk? Could his radical anti-Iranian position perhaps get the Saudis to change tack, drop the Iranian détente and join a US attack on Iran in the hope of getting in a ‘knock-out punch’ against Iran that overcomes the mutual exhaustion that led to détente, to instead achieve more complete Saudi hegemony?

Perhaps; I don’t claim to be a seer. But there are good reasons to doubt such unlikely outcomes. In addition to the points above, there is also the fact that when push came to shove, Trump did not come to the party last round. In 2019, a massive Iranian attack (laughably attributed to the Houthis) on the Saudi oil industry put half of it offline, cut 5 percent of world crude production and led to the biggest spike in oil prices for decades; Trump’s response was, first, to declare the US was “locked and loaded” to respond, but the next day, that “I’m somebody that would like not to have war.” Nothing happened. So the same hawkish Trump who ripped up the JCPOA in deference to Israel, imposed “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran and assassinated head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp, Qasem Soleimani, in Baghdad, now turned on his dovish face when it came to defending its Saudi ally. The Saudis, therefore, have every reason to consider him a bad investment.

Besides, it is unclear that is even the direction the highly unpredictable Trump regime will go. While giving 100 percent support to Israel for its maximal goals in Palestine appears a given, it should not be assumed that Trump will necessarily be as accommodating with regard to issues of a fundamentally secondary nature to Israel; and we should be clear that Iran is in this class, a symbolic, diversionary, mobilisational ‘issue’ for Israel rather than anything fundamental. In fact, these Iranian and Israeli attacks on each others’ soil this year have been about ‘demonstrating deterrence’ but had essentially nothing to do with Palestine.

So, on the one hand, the Wall Street Journal reports that Trump “plans to drastically increase sanctions on Iran and throttle its oil sales as part of an aggressive strategy to undercut Tehran’s support of violent Mideast proxies and its nuclear program,” and, when Biden pressured Israel to not hit Iran’s nuclear facilities in its October 26 air attack, Trump retorted “that’s the thing you want to hit right?”; while on the other, Trump has also said he aims to be “friendly” with Iran and opposed to any US involvement in ‘regime change’, his billionaire advisor Elon Musk met Iran’s UN ambassador in New York to discuss how to defuse tensions, and Trump said that the US “has to make a deal” with Iran, “because the consequences are impossible” – just a deal that Trump can somehow pass off as “better for the US” than the one he ripped up. His vice-president, JD Vance, was even more explicit, stating following Israel’s October 26 Iran strike that while this was a case of Israel legitimately defending itself, “sometimes we’re going to have overlapping interests, and sometimes we’re going to have distinct interests. And our interest very much is in not going to war with Iran.”

Even more intriguing is that Ron Dermer, a Netanyahu aide, told Trump and his Zionist nut-job son-in-law Jared Kushner that Israel aims to deliver a ceasefire in Lebanon in order to “gift something to Trump,” which strongly implies that Israel has been continuing its seemingly aimless and endless murderous rampage in Lebanon, long after calling Hezbollah’s bluff and wiping out most of its leadership, only to first embarrass Biden and help him lose the election, and then further so that a ceasefire coincides with Trump assuming the presidency as a “gift.” Though that may depend on whether or not the highly intoxicated Zionist regime decides that southern Lebanon is in fact ‘Israel’, and whether or not Trump will go that far or draw a line.

So perhaps Trump won’t even attempt to challenge the Saudi-Iranian relationship. And perhaps Israel, Saudi Arabia and Iran will all emerge victorious in their own right under a Trump regime, with only the Palestinians losing out. I‘m not putting money on it: Trump may well decide an attempt to destroy Iran will be his ‘legacy’, though I wouldn’t put money on that either. Even then it is highly doubtful the Saudis would be drawn into it, or into relations with Israel without at least a Palestinian mini-state to show for it.

Saudi and Iranian flags

Trump as Gaza genocide enabler v Trump as ‘peace-maker’: Squaring the circle of deceit

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Netanyahu welcomed Trump’s re-election

By Michael Karadjis

There may seem an obvious contradiction between Trump’s calls for Israel to be allowed to “finish the job” in Gaza, and his statements that he wants Israel “end the war quickly,” both of which he has made over the last year or so. The easiest way to explain it is simply that he is a liar, simply says what his audience wants to hear, and is smart enough to word these statements vaguely enough so that they are open to interpretation. In that sense, the circle is easy to square: Trump wants to allow Israel to go even harder, as hard as humanly possible, in order to “finish the job” (ie genocide), and that way, he can “end the war quickly.” “Peace through strength” and all that.

However, there is another way of looking at this. Israel has already won the war in Gaza, we must regretfully admit, notwithstanding many illusions to the contrary. A recent UN report showed that Gaza had been set back 7 decades, while another claimed that it would take 350 years to rebuild to what was there before. It would take at least 14 years just to clear the 42 million tonnes of rubble. Everything necessary for human existence has been destroyed. Probably several hundred thousand over time, “by hook or by crook,” have crossed over into Egypt, and from there “to some other corner of the world,” according to Professor Norman Finkelstein, and can never return; the numbers of dead are estimated to be many times the official 43,000 count. Sure, Netanyahu has not been able to drive all 2.3 million Palestinians into Egypt as initially hoped because the Egyptian al-Sisi dictatorship hates Palestinians as much as Israel does, and so shows … “resistance” to the new Nakbah. And sure, the second plan, the currently under-implementation ‘Generals’ Plan’, to push everyone remaining in northern Gaza into the absurdly crowded south, across the Netzarim Corridor which cuts across the middle of Gaza that will remain occupied by Israeli troops, and hence annex the norther half, is not complete, but has been in operation for the last 6 weeks and there are only estimated to be 75-95,000 Palestinians remaining in the north, and they are under immediate threat of mass starvation; Israel now admits it will not allow anyone to return.

Just to clarify, we often hear that Israel has not achieved any of its “stated aims,” namely to “destroy Hamas” and get the hostages home, “all it has achieved is genocide.” Genocide, however, has been precisely Israel’s aim all along; the “stated aims” are just smokescreens. It never had anything to do with the absurd idea of “destroying Hamas”, because everyone, especially Israeli leaders, knows that a resistance movement cannot be “destroyed” as long as people are under brutal occupation; one might claim therefore that Israel is removing the people themselves in order to destroy the resistance movement based among them, but even that is putting things in reverse: the aim is to remove the people, and having a “stated aim” that is absurd and unachievable allows Israel to just keep on carrying out the actual aim. Though of course a resistance movement like Hamas can be drastically weakened, and this has been achieved, alongside its leadership being wiped out. As for the hostages, if returning them alive was the goal, Israel would have agreed to a ceasefire and hostage exchange long ago; no rational person thinks this can be achieved via genocidal bombing, which has already killed plenty of Israeli hostages.

Why then has Netanyahu resisted calls by a host of Israeli political leaders of the Zionist “centre” (who would not be “centre” anywhere else in the world, eg, hard war criminals like former prime minister Ehud Olmert), and, toothlessly, by Biden, to wind up the war – as Olmert assessed back in May that “we have seen a genuine, impressive and unprecedented victory” – and do a deal to get Israeli hostages back? Seems to me it has a lot to do with Netanyahu wanting to get Trump back into power. Keep the war and killing going, know that Biden/Harris will do nothing except issue statements of concern, Trump returns. Indeed, Trump even asked Netanyahu to not sign any ceasefire/hostage exchange deal before the US elections as it might ruin his election chances.

So, now that Trump has returned, well, kill a while longer, especially to complete the Generals Plan in northern Gaza, so by the time Trump assumes full office in late January, he will be able to say “OK Bibi, that’s enough for now,” and Bibi will (perhaps) be in a position to finally sign on to a ceasefire as he has “finished the job,” and Americans and the world see that Trump “ends the war”.

OK, but in that case, if Israel has indeed finished the job, why would it need to continue it just to help get Trump elected, because in that case, why would it even need Trump? Since Biden/Harris already quite happily let Israel “finish the job” as Trump requested of them, without even needing his requests?

Yes, absolutely, but Gaza is not the prize. For Israel, the prize is the West Bank, which is about 17 times the size of Gaza, despite having an almost similar number of people. Gaza needed to be destroyed, because it is a giant refugee camp from 1948 Israel; a living embodiment of the first Nakbah. In itself though, its value is limited, though of course Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has stated that once the population is removed from Gaza by driving them into Egypt or the desert, it will be prime real estate as its “waterfront property could be very valuable.” But the West Bank is the real deal.

Last time in office, the Trump government reversed long term official US policy by declaring it no longer considered Israeli “settlements” in the West Bank to be in violation of international law, in violation of countless UN resolutions according to which “settling” (ie colonising) occupied territory is considered a war crime. While the Biden government, outrageously, did not reverse some of Trump’s illegal moves, such as the recognition of Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem and moving the US embassy there, it did reverse this particular ruling and restore the view that the settlements are illegal, and even imposed sanctions on some settlers it deems “violent”, as if the entire settlement program were not violent land theft by definition.

Netanyahu therefore has good reason to believe that Trump and his far-right team (and on the issue of Israel/Palestine, there is no difference between the Trumpist/nativist far-right and the neoconservative far-right in the Republican Party) will allow Israel to outright annex the West Bank, or at least annex about half of it, where the Israeli “settlers” and their settler-only highways, cutting up the Palestinian population centres, are located. Indeed, as soon as Trump’s election victory was announced, Netanyahu appointed an extreme right-wing supporter of West Bank “settlement,” Yechiel Leiter, as new Israeli ambassador to the US. Leiter has called for Israeli ‘sovereignty’ over the West Bank, and is a former member of the extreme right-wing Jewish Defense League, founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane, which was designated a terrorist organisation by the US and even by Israel in the 1990s; now Itamar Ben-Gvir, another Kahanist, is Netanyahu’s Minister of National Security.

Outright annexation of the West Bank, or the parts colonised by Israel, would leave the major Palestinian population centres as mere reservations, towns with no economy and no land, to rot, its people merely cheap labour at best for Israeli bosses. Of course, that is already the de facto situation, but if Netanyahu were to formally annex the region and Trump were to recognise it, then perhaps Trump and even Netanyahu may be happy to call these disconnected towns a “Palestinian state” and demand Palestinians accept this as the “deal of the century” if they really want “peace.”

Not that Biden, Harris and the Democrats would have done a thing to stop Netanyahu if his regime did go ahead an annex all or half the West Bank; but it is very unlikely that they would give it formal recognition. Throughout the past year, even while continuing to arm the genocide and allow Israel to cross every ‘red line’, Biden and his ministers have continually said that after Israel was done “defending itself,” there would need to be a settlement based on the “two-state solution,” that Palestinians also have some rights and so on. Of course, Biden’s “two-state solution” is not the international consensus two states, ie, based on a Palestinian state in all of the territory occupied by Israel in 1967 with Jerusalem as its capital; but nevertheless, any idea of “two states” with at least enough basis for the reactionary Arab states to sign on to is still based on the international legality of UN resolutions, rather than by formalising the violation of them as Netanyahu and Trump prefer. Even on Gaza, while allowing Israel to do everything, the Biden government has still said there can be no annexation or re-settlement of Gaza or part of it.

So, while it would do nothing if Israel formally annexed the West Bank, and would probably continue to arm Israel to the teeth anyway, a Harris-led government would however express a lot of “concern” about the move, declare that it does not help the “peace process,” tut-tut a lot about it, keep talking about the need for a half-baked “two state solution,” talk about “diplomacy” and “international law,” refuse to give it formal recognition. With Trump, Netanyahu doesn’t need to listen to such sermons; he gets full recognition of the annexation of the West Bank, and then everyone can blame the Palestinians for rejecting “the best ever offer.”  

Dumb Things Zionists Say: 3. There was already a ceasefire on October 6.

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by Michael Karadjis

Note the date:

“HUWARA, West Bank, Oct 6 (Reuters) – A Jewish settler killed a 19-year-old Palestinian during a settler attack on the occupied West Bank town of Huwara on Friday, the Palestinian Health Ministry said. Residents said a group of settlers had erected a tent in Huwara, held prayers and later marched through the town. Some of them were carrying arms and began vandalising shops and cars, they said. One of the settlers shot university student Labib Dumaidi, who later died of his wounds in hospital, the residents said.”

As this settler murder was a rather run-of-the mill event in occupied Palestine, clearly there was no “ceasefire” for Palestinians on October 6.

What they mean is that there was a ceasefire for Israelis on October 6, and before. Of course there has been no ceasefire for Palestinians since 1948, when they were ethnically cleansed from their homes and land to create a Jewish state on their land, at a cost of 15,000 Palestinians killed by Zionist terror gangs, something, understandably enough, they have never accepted; the process then continued after 1967 in complete international illegality (despite the lack of any international sanctions) in the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza; and has been ongoing ever since. And since these territories conquered in 1967 are recognised by international law to be under illegal occupation, then resistance, including armed resistance, of the occupied Palestinian people is recognised as their legal right; clearly, if another country is illegally occupying yours, there is by definition no “ceasefire.”

But since that begins a long way back, and is such a sweeping picture that many simply refuse to accept the reality that dispossession, occupation, ongoing land theft, apartheid and complete Israeli impunity over Palestinian life is no “ceasefire” and leads naturally to armed and civil resistance, let’s begin a little closer to the date, the last 20 years for example.

Source: UN, https://www.ochaopt.org/data/casualties?fbclid=IwAR0tItHp1z2rZTvZ6BQsZ_-B_NYC6kxuA9t-SiuHSmLFmqSOXc_xen8AFGw

In the last 20 years, the number of Palestinian civilians killed (4331) is over 22 times the number of Israeli civilians (195) within this just war of resistance against occupation (much the same for total casualties, 6936 Palestinians versus 330 Israelis or 21 times); thus even if we make the caveat that the right of armed resistance does not give that resistance the right to target civilians, then Israel is 22 times more guilty than the Palestinian resistance of such violations, and needless to say killing thousands of Palestinian civilians does not make the period a “ceasefire” for them. Even during the Hamas suicide attacks in the early 2000s, the numbers of Palestinians killed was double, triple or quadruple the numbers of Israelis; and starting from 2004 when these attacks declined then ended completely in 2005, and thereafter, as the number of Israeli casualties reduced to close to zero, the number of Palestinians killed increased dramatically, as the first chart below shows:

Source: https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-208380/; the situation is even worse when we look at injuries, which demonstrate even more the ongoing, daily abuse of Palestinians, Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20240105033037/https://www.statista.com/chart/16516/israeli-palestinian-casualties-by-in-gaza-and-the-west-bank/

These killings include such major Israeli atrocities in Gaza as Operation Cast Lead in 2008-2009, when Israel killed some 1400 Palestinians, 82 percent of whom were civilians, and as usual massively attacked human infrastructure, with egregious crimes including the killing of entire families, attacks on schools, use of white phosphorous, and killing of civilians carrying white flags; Operation Pillar of Defense in November 2012, which killed 167 Palestinians, “including at least 87 who did not take part in the hostilities, 32 of whom were minors;” Operation Protective Edge in 2014, when Israel killed 2250 Palestinians, two-thirds civilians, including 551 children, and injured 11,231, including 3,540 women and 3,436 children, mostly civilians, while in addition “118 UNRWA installations were damaged, including 83 schools and 10 health centres,” and “over 12,600 housing units were totally destroyed and almost 6,500 sustained severe damage,” while another 150,000 were rendered inhabitable, and 500,000 were internally displaced; Israel also massively attacked Gaza’s water and power infrastructure, with long-term consequences as the blockade made repairs almost impossible; the Great March of Return in 2018-19, when thousands of Palestinians daily rallied peacefully next to the Israel-Gaza fence and Israel’s response was to shoot to kill and maim, with 266 Palestinians massacred, including 50 children, while over 30,000 were wounded, including 3000 children, with special focus on the knees leading to a spike in amputations; 2021, which killed 261 people, including 67 children, wounded over 2,200, destroyed or damaged over 1770 housing units, while 290 water infrastructure “objects” were damaged, leading to “untreated sewage flowed into the streets, lakes, and sea.” And this is all in the context of the Israeli air-land-sea blockade of Gaza, the impact of which on Palestinians’ access to food, water, medical care and the ability to have any kind of economy has been widely documented, the UN describing Gaza under its impact as “unliveable.”  

None of this suggests any “ceasefire” in the last 20 years before October 7. But once again, some may still find this too large a sweep to accept that the reality for Palestinians was anything but ceasefire. So, once again, let’s narrow the picture further, to just 2023.

Before October 7, 2023, 234 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank since the beginning of that year, and another none were killed by “settlers,” including 41 children. By the end of 2023, this figure had doubled to 507, including 81 children, making it “the deadliest year for Palestinians since the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) began recording casualties in 2005.” This was up from 155 killed in 2022, already the highest figure since 2005. By August, the number of Palestinians injured with live ammunition in the West Bank stood at 683, more than double the 2012 figure of 307. There were an average of 95 monthly settler attacks on Palestinians in 2023, up from 71 in 2022.

Let’s look at some major cases of non-ceasefire from 2023.

On January 15, the IOF shot 14-year old Omar Khaled Lutfi Khmour in the head, killing him, in a pre-dawn raid on Dheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem, the fourth child, and 14th Palestinian, to be killed already in the first two weeks of the year.

On January 26, the IOF invaded Jenin refugee camp, killing 10 Palestinians, including a 61-year old woman, and wounding another 20. Bottom of Form

An ambulance driver attempting to get to the wounded was shot at and prevented from approaching.

Ceasefire? Israeli forces raided the Jenin camp, January 2023 [Zain Jaafar/AFP]

On February 23, the IOF raided an apartment block in Nablus, killing 11 people, including a 72-year old, and wounding over one hundred civilians with gunshots, the IOF claiming to be hunting three resistance fighters. Video shows IOF killers shooting an unarmed man running away, and an Israeli military vehicle plowing into a crowd.

On March 2, the IOF raided Nablus city centre, killing 6 resistance fighters, and 4 civilians, including a 16-year old boy.

On March 16, the IOF killed 2 men and a 16-year old boy in Jenin by firing on their car; the three had been prisoners in occupation jails who were recently released, while another 14-year old boy who had been shot days earlier also died.

Ceasefire? Palestinian children inspect the rubble of their demolished school in Jib al-Dib.

On May 7, the IOF demolished the Palestinian primary school in Jib al-Dib, an “unrecognized village” near illegal Israeli “settlements” in Area C of the occupied West Bank. The school was attended by 40 children aged 6-10. Before the school was built, children in Jib al-Dib had to walk an hour each way to school. The school was constructed by the Palestinian Authority without the permission of the illegal occupation authorities, who reject around 99 percent of such requests in Area C. The EU, which had funded the project, condemned the demolition and said it was “appalled,” empty words Palestinians are used to hearing.

On May 9, the IOF attacked Gaza in a firefight with Palestinian resistance fighters; of the 33 killed, 13 were civilians, including “four girls, three boys, four women and two men,” according to the UN, while 6 were known to be fighters, the status of the remainder unconfirmed. Al Mezan, a Gaza-based human rights organisation, said the IOF had Israel “destroyed nearly 60 residential units, displacing almost 375 people, around a third of them children.” Israel also banned fuel for Gaza’s powerplant, forcing the closure of water treatment plants which caused 120,000 cubic meters of untreated wastewater to be discharged into the sea, while medical facilities and schools were also damaged by the strikes.

Ceasefire? Palestinian homes destroyed in Gaza, May 9, 2023. Below, Israelis celebrating the massacre.

On May 22, extreme right-wing Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir stormed the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem with dozens of Israeli settlers, guarded by Israeli cops, who also restricted entry to Palestinians. In early June Ben-Gvir called on illegal settlers to take over the territory and kill dozens, hundreds or thousands of Palestinians, as necessary.

On June 19, Israel again invaded the Jenin refugee camp, backed by air strikes from helicopter gunships for the first time in 20 years in the West Bank, killing 5 and injuring 91 Palestinians. Once again ambulances were attacked as they came to the rescue.

On July 3, the IDF again invaded the Jenin camp, with over 1,000 troops “backed up by Shin Bet intelligence agents, Magav border police, armed drones, helicopter gunships, armoured personnel carriers and armoured bulldozers,” killing 13 Palestinians and wounding over 100.

On August 4, these near-daily Israeli atrocities were becoming so blatant that even the US State Department used the terms “terror attack” and “violent extremism” to describe the murder of 19-year old Palestinian Qusai Jamal Maatan, near Ramallah, by settler fanatics who stormed his village.

According to the UN, “On 10 August, an Israeli undercover unit raided Nablus city, where an exchange of fire with Palestinians ensued, killing a 23-year-old Palestinian man. On 11 August, Israeli forces raided the Tulkarm Refugee Camp and shot and killed a 25-year-old Palestinian. At least three others were also injured, including two by live ammunition. According to a human rights organization, the man killed was not involved in the exchange of fire between Israeli forces and Palestinians. On 15 August, Israeli forces shot and killed two Palestinians including one 16-year-old child, during a search-and-arrest operation in Aqabet Jaber Camp Refugee Camp (Jericho).”

In the same report, the UN reported that “on 21 August, Palestinians demonstrated along Israel’s perimeter fence marking the 54th anniversary of burning Al-Aqsa Mosque. Palestinians burnt tires and threw stones and explosive devices towards the Israeli fence. Israeli forces shot live ammunition, rubber bullets and teargas canisters, injuring 19 Palestinians, including 12 children.”

On September 24, two Palestinians were killed when the IOF attacked Nour Shams Refugee Camp near Tulkarem in the northern West Bank.

And so on. These are just the killings – it would be difficult to document all the land seizures, destruction of housing and infrastructure, arbitrary arrests, home raids, endless harassment at checkpoints that have all been part of Palestinians’ daily lives for decades but which have increased sharply in 2023. In August 2023, the Norwegian Refugee Council produced a report on the forced displacement of Palestinians from their land which stated that “entire Palestinian communities [are] being wiped off the map.”

Obviously, none of this sounds much like “ceasefire.” And if even this picture of the whole of 2023 is still not convincing, let’s return to the beginning, to October 6:

“HUWARA, West Bank, Oct 6 (Reuters) – A Jewish settler killed a 19-year-old Palestinian during a settler attack on the occupied West Bank town of Huwara on Friday, the Palestinian Health Ministry said. Residents said a group of settlers had erected a tent in Huwara, held prayers and later marched through the town. Some of them were carrying arms and began vandalising shops and cars, they said. One of the settlers shot university student Labib Dumaidi, who later died of his wounds in hospital, the residents said.”

Obviously, both armed and civil resistance are justified against violent occupation, and when the occupier is killing you every day to facilitate ongoing land theft, you have every right to fire back. Far from October 7 breaking a “ceasefire,” it is clear from this brief summary that it was merely a continuation.

One might say that the right to armed resistance against a brutal, murderous occupation regime does not justify the likewise brutal large-scale slaughter of Israeli civilians as occurred on October 7, and most would agree [and it is a secondary question whether that was the intent of the al-Aqsa Flood operation on October 7, which goes against the evidence I am aware of, or rather was an unintended consequence as hundreds of brutalised-from-birth Palestinians broke out of the cage they were locked in all their lives and turned brutaliser]. But if we agree that civilians should not be killed in military operations, surely that applies over 20 times as much to the Israeli occupation regime for the two decades (at least) prior to October 7, given the data above? And given that Israel’s so-called “response” has killed 40-50 times as many Palestinians since October as Israelis who were killed on that day, let alone the deliberate destruction of everything necessary for human life in Gaza and Israel’s policy of deliberate starvation, then it should also apply dozens of times more to Israel?

October 7 was not the end of a ceasefire, it was a continuation of decades of anything other.    

The Israel-Iran theater show–a distraction from Gaza genocide 

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The Israel-Iran theater show–a distraction from Gaza genocide 

by Michael Karadjis

Michael Karadjis explains how the recent interchange of missiles between Israel and Iran was an episode of theater distracting from the ongoing genocide in Gaza and leaving Israel more powerful.

Iranian missiles above Israel. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

How many Palestinians have Israel shot, bombed, and starved in the last week or so? Not a lot of it has been in the news, because we’ve been distractedby “bigger” theatre: a “regional” conflict may be brewing. Let’s observe and analyze this bigger picture, while remembering that the ongoing genocide in Gaza is the real issue here, not Israeli and Iranian fireworks.

At least 43 more Palestinians were killed and 62 others injured on April 13 in four Israeli massacres in Gaza. The next day another five Palestinians were killed “when the Israeli army shelled hundreds of displaced Palestinians trying to return to their homes in the northern Gaza Strip.” Meanwhile, as Al-Jazeera reported, in the West Bank in the same period, while drones flew overhead, mobs of Israeli settlers, backed by troops, spearheaded a large-scale attack on the village of al-Mughayyir, where they killed one Palestinian man and injured 25 others. Since then, settlers have attacked more towns and villages near Ramallah including Bukra, Deir Dubwan, and Kfar Malik.

This is the ongoing reality behind the theatrical scenes we have witnessed over the last week. While the world witnessed the performative deployment of great military hardware on both sides, as both proclaimed self-defense, there was no power to knock out Israeli planes bombing Palestinians; no discussion of Palestine’s right to defend itself.

The U.S. has been pleased that decades of Iranian-regime “anti-Zionist” bluster (aimed at internal and regional homogenization rather than at being taken seriously) amounted to nothing at all as Israel committed genocide in Gaza for six months. Despite Iranian leaders initially promising to back Palestinian resistance “until the liberation of Palestine and Al-Quds,” with one leader claiming an Israeli ground invasion of Gaza would “open that gates of hell,” in reality “the chasm between Iran’s bellicose rhetoric and relatively restrained action is even sharper in the current Gaza war” than in previous wars. Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei famously told Hamas chief Ismael Haniyeh in Tehran, that since Hamas “gave us no warning, we will not enter the war on your behalf,” allegedly demanding that Haniyeh silence Palestinian voices calling on Iran or Hezbollah to join the battle. In November, the U.S. allowed Iraq to transfer $10 billion it owed Iran in electricity payments in a sanctions waiver. According to The Economist, this was a reward to Iran for holding back its proxies after October 7.

However, Israeli leaders were less pleased. They were probably pleased in the first month or two, allowing them time to get on with the genocide. Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, boasted that “no one has come to [Hamas’s] aid – neither the Iranians nor Hizbullah.” But after that, Israeli leaders, or at least Netanyahu’s gang, appeared to want to escalate. For example, while the attacks and counter-attacks between Israel and Hezbollah on the Lebanese border were initially well-calibrated on both sides, restricted to a few kilometers, Israel soon upped the ante: While some twenty troops and civilians have been killed on the Israeli side, about 240 Hezbollah and other fighting cadre and forty Lebanese civilians had been killed by increasingly violent and reckless Israeli bombing by March. By late in 2023, Israel was escalating with targeted killings of leading Hezbollah cadre and Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon and Syria, which appeared to be aimed at getting a response.

For years, Israel has bombed Iranian and Hezbollah targets in Syria, but mostly they targeted weapons shipments, warehouses, and the like where Iran was transferring missiles to Hezbollah. These Israeli bombings were carried out with the facilitation of Syria’s Russian-controlled air defenses, an arrangement made through countless high-level meetings between then-best-friends Putin and Netanyahu, who over a decade met together more than any other two world leaders. Israel supported the Assad regime remaining in power, but without Iranian backing, and therefore welcomed Russia’s intervention on Assad’s behalf as an alternative. Russia and Iran jointly saved Assad, but then became rivals over domination of the Assadist corpse.

Yet over all these years of attacks, none of them were ever carried out in response to any imaginary Iranian or Hezbollah attacks on “Israel” (i.e., the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan); the Israeli and Western propaganda that Israel attacks Iranian forces because they pose a “threat” to Israel was very theoretical indeed. In fact, only twice, in my close reading, was there even retaliation (once by Iran, in May 2018, once by Hezbollah, in January 2015), as against hundreds of Israeli attacks.

But only in the last six months has Israel progressed to these targeted killings of significant numbers of important Iranian or Hezbollah figures, but no matter how many were killed, even leading Revolutionary Guards, still there was zero retaliation from Iran. Following a series of suspiciously precise Israeli strikes killing around a dozen leading Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Syria in December and January, Iran’s response was to pull back the Guards from Syria to avoid getting pulled into the conflict.

How is Israel supposed to maintain a 30-year propaganda campaign, that it faces not just the brutally oppressed Palestinians, but behind them a large evil power bent on wiping out Israel and Jews (sometimes referred to as “the Fourth Reich”) allegedly dedicated to Israel’s destruction, when, for years, that power never does anything, not even as a response? And continues the same, no matter how much Israel has turned up the dial in recent months. Israel cultivates this propaganda not because it fears Iran – a laughable proposition for a nuclear-armed military and economic superpower – but because of its utility as a key ideological prop for the Zionist enterprise. In the same way, Iran plays the same propaganda game in relation to Israel. Just as Israel used this propaganda to justify the brutal oppression of Palestine, Iran used the same to mobilize supporters and death squads against opponents – mostly Sunni Muslims – in Iraq and Syria as it built its sub-imperial arc from Iran to the Mediterranean Sea.

While the world witnessed the performative deployment of great military hardware on both sides, as both proclaimed self-defense, there was no power to knock out Israeli planes bombing Palestinians; no discussion of Palestine’s right to defend itself.

But now in the context of its Gaza genocide and the mass global opposition that was confronting it, an Iranian response became especially important for Israel, because if Iran’s response were harsh enough, it may force the U.S. to enter the battle directly against Iran, and under the cover of such a region-wide conflagration, Israel could carry out its genocide in Gaza–and the West Bank–to completion. Israel’s crimes would become a mere sideshow compared to this “bigger picture,” and the world could be convinced that “poor little Israel” faces powerful enemies attacking it. So, it finally made the decision to hit the Iranian consulate in Syria, knowing Iran would now have no choice but to respond at some level or lose face completely.

At first, Iran said it held the U.S. responsible, a hint that the response might simply be that its Iraqi Shiite militia proxies go back to hitting U.S. bases in Iraq or Syria, something they stopped completely months ago (under Iranian regime pressure). Then the U.S. stressed that it was not “involved in any way whatsoever,” that it had received no advance warning from Israel (and was not happy about that), so Iran had better not hit U.S. forces. This was a hint that Iran should instead hit Israeli interests, somewhere. Then Iran hinted that its response would not be of an escalatory nature, and U.S. sources initially agreed that the response would be minor. But then we began to read in the media exactly what its response would be–a drone and missile attack on Israel from Iranian territory–somewhat more significant than initially expected. But the reason we could read about it was that Iran gave the U.S. 72 hours’ notice via various intermediaries–Oman, Iraq, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Switzerland have all been mentioned–so that the U.S. and Israel would know exactly what was coming, giving them plenty of time to prepare. In real-time theatre, discussions were essentially going on in the media between the U.S. and Iran through these intermediaries over what was deemed to be within reasonable limits to avoid escalation and so on. The U.S. made it clear that if Iran hit Israel, U.S. support for Israel’s defense is “ironclad.”

Of course, this well-choreographed retaliation gave time for Israel, the U.S., the U.K., France, and even Jordan to be well-positioned to shoot down 99 percent of the 350 drones and missiles that Iran sent against Israel. Reportedly, some drones even had their lights on! Iran’s attack was aimed at an Israeli military base, not at civilians, as U.S. leaders confirmed. Iran then declared that the matter was “concluded”. Meanwhile, since the U.S.’s “ironclad” defense of Israel had indeed been successfully put into action, the U.S. therefore, did not need to do any more. Biden commended Israel on the success of its amazing air defense system–even though this may not have been the case if the U.S. and others had not helped–telling Israel, “You got a win. Take the win” and move on; Biden stressed that the U.S. would not support or participate in any offensive Israeli operations against Iran in retaliation.

Two men stand in a pile of rubble.Damage in Gaza, October 2023. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

The U.K., France, Germany, and other Western countries all likewise called on Israel to avoid retaliating. Russia and China neither supported nor condemned Iran’s attack (just as the U.S., U.K., and France had refused to condemn Israel’s attack on the Iranian consulate in the UN) but expressed alarm about escalation and called for calm.

So, who won, lost, or came out even in this?

Iran and the U.S., for their own reasons, want to avoid escalation. Israel, for reasons explained above, wants to escalate, but not to fight Iran itself, but rather focus on smashing Gaza. For Israel, escalation means that the U.S. gets sucked into a war of non-choice with Iran while Israel gets on with killing the Palestinians, its real, not phantom, enemies. The U.S. has given Israel 100 percent of its support – despite occasional toothless hand-wringing – to Israel’s war of genocide in Gaza but has no interest in getting sucked into Netanyahu’s escalatory games. This reluctance is not out of pacifism; it’s just that it has much bigger issues with Russia in Ukraine and China in the South China Sea, and, as Obama’s Iran nuclear accord showed, the Democrats at least have a more rational understanding that Iranian capitalism merely wants a recognized place in the region and that the bluster, is, well, bluster.

From that perspective, Israel did gain a lot. Above all, the whole episode created a theatrical distraction from Gaza; it allowed Israel to get on with mass murder while the world’s attention was elsewhere; it covered  Israel scuttling the latest negotiations of ceasefire and hostage release; and it demonstrated how efficient its defenses were. The fact that Iran chose a full frontal attack on Israel, rather than an equivalent act such as hitting an Israeli embassy somewhere, allows Israel to again play-act that it is up against a powerful “evil” regime that wants to destroy it. The episode assembled a collection of Western powers and even Jordan as a “defend Israel” coalition. The escalating criticisms of its monstrous war coming from various Western powers, even to some extent from Biden and the U.S. government, have now been blunted. Massive new arms deals with Israel and sanctions on Iran are the word from the U.S. and Western allies.

On the other hand, this is not quite enough for Netanyahu; it is not quite a regional conflagration. The limitations, and above all the choreography, of Iran’s harmless attack do nothing to bring in the U.S. to wage war on Iran; on the contrary, it allows the U.S. to preach restraint.

Iran also gained: It could say, we retaliated for the violation of our consulate, but we also acted responsibly. If Iran had not planned for all its drones and missiles to be shot down, then this would be a severe humiliation. But since that was precisely the plan, Iran simultaneously gained credibility and showed “responsibility.” It also demonstrated that it had had the potential to do damage if it had not given extensive warning, and clear notice to Israel that it no longer accepted the previous rules. It was also a useful exercise for Iran to “test out” Israeli air defense weaponry, though of course, Israel benefits in the same way.

Above all, the whole episode created a theatrical distraction from Gaza; it allowed Israel to get on with mass murder while the world’s attention was elsewhere; it covered Israel scuttling the latest negotiations of ceasefire and hostage release; and it demonstrated how efficient its defenses were.

But again, on the other hand, it can also be argued that Iran fell into Israel’s trap by retaliating, though it had little choice. While the planned results of its attack show restraint, just the fact that it chose a full-frontal attack from its territory as its method of retaliation has allowed the West to denounce “Iranian aggression” and step up support for Israel.

Arguably, the U.S. gained the most by being in a position to jointly choreograph, with Iran, the latter’s response through intermediaries and then play the decisive role in helping Israel shoot down all the Iranian hardware, it placed itself in a strong position. If its aim was to show it could defend Israel while avoiding escalation, it came out on top. While the U.S. tells Israel it should be happy to see how well its defenses performed, Israel knows its dependence on the U.S. has been displayed; this arguably puts the U.S. in a strong position to moderate Israel’s next steps.

Of course, the U.S. has continually criticized some aspects of Israel’s war while at every stage supplying Israel with the weapons to carry out its genocide, so no one should wager too much on the idea that the U.S. will not buckle if Israel were to choose a hard escalatory response. However, it appears that this has been avoided with yet another piece of elaborate theatre, this time by Israel.

Following Iran’s attack, Israel immediately announced that it had to respond and would “decide for itself” in a pointed snub to U.S. advice. As expected, the U.S. began to come around, U.S. leaders now claiming to understand that Israel “had to respond” in some way. So, the U.S. advised Israel to keep it non-escalatory. But if Israel’s response to Iran’s response was not proportionate or bigger, that would not be good for Israel’s credibility. Some Israeli leaders wanted to wage a massive attack on Iran. To prevent that, it appears that the U.S. came up with a deal to save Israel, Iran, and the region from escalation at the expense of the Palestinians.

According to Egyptian officials cited by The Times of Israel on Thursday, “The American administration showed acceptance of the plan previously presented by the occupation government regarding the military operation in Rafah, in exchange for not carrying out a large-scale attack against Iran” [emphasis added]. In other words, no retaliation has been replaced with no “large-scale” retaliation. This is all Israel has to promise in order for the U.S. to give its assent – thus far not clearly given – for Israel to launch its heralded attack on Rafah, where 1.5 million Palestinians have been driven, up against the border of Egypt, into which Israel would like to expel them.

On Friday, April 19, Israel launched its retaliation. Explosions were heard in the Iranian city of Isfahan. Israel did not explicitly report anything; Iran said the explosions were not missiles but the actions of its air defenses knocking out several drones; Iran said the event was so small that it is uncertain where the drones came from and speculated that it may have been an internal attack by “infiltrators” and indicated that it therefore had no plans to retaliate.

Before proclaiming this as a victory for Iran and a climb-down by Israel, by targeting Isfahan, where Iran has major sites of its nuclear program, without hitting them, Israel has shown that it can target them if it chooses to. Therefore, despite the small size of the action, it is an important implicit threat.

Iran wins; Israel wins; escalation is avoided (for now); the U.S. wins. But if the terms of the alleged deal are true, Palestine loses. Following Iran’s retaliatory attack, its UN mission declared it had been conducted “in response to the Zionist regime’s aggression against our diplomatic premises in Damascus” based on Article 51 of the UN Charter “pertaining to legitimate defense,” and therefore the matter can be deemed concluded.” This was not only a message to Israel, but also to Palestine; if, as expected, Israel now goes ahead with a savage attack on Rafah, backed by the U.S., Palestine is on its own.

Ruthlessly repressive capitalist dictatorships like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, the UAE, and so on have nothing to offer the Palestinian people and never have had – regardless of their rhetoric and whether they use hollow phrases like “resistance” in their titles or not. On one hand, none have ever done anything to aid Palestine; on the other, given their nature as active enemies of human emancipation, even if they did make bumbling attempts to live up to their rhetoric, it would tend to be counterproductive.

The entirely theatrical nature of the past week’s events merely highlights this fact graphically. Only the oppressed peoples of the region, when they next rise against their oppressors, can be real allies of Palestine. In the meantime, all solidarity with the Palestinian resistance in Rafah and throughout Gaza is essential to prevent Israel from using the past week’s events to further its genocidal project.

Featured image credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:F-15I_vs_Iranian_strikes_on_Israel_02.jpg; modified by Tempest.

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Dumb things Zionists say: 2. Since the Palestinians rejected the offer of 43% of Palestine as an ‘Arab state’ in the 1947 UN partition, Israel had the right to conquer half of it and increase its allotted 56% to 78% of Palestine.

mkaradjisLeave a comment

by Michael Karadjis

Source: https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2015/06/28/1947-un-partition-plan-1949-armistice-comparison-map/

Indeed, due to this original sin, the Palestinians have no right to ever demand a return to this original partition or one closer to 50/50 (if the preferable one-state solution continues to evade them).

Logical right? Why don’t we try some other examples?

Russia has conquered and annexed about 20% of Ukraine. Not surprisingly, Ukraine does not agree and fights back, just like the Palestinians in 1948 rejected losing more than half of their country. So therefore, due to Ukraine’s rudeness in not accepting that might equals right, now Russia should annex 50% of Ukraine, and it will be Ukraine’s own fault.

In 1974, Turkey conquered 38% of Cyprus (ethnic Turkish Cypriots were 18% of the population, scattered throughout the island), and later declared this a ‘Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. Cyprus rejected this partition and continues to, so therefore Turkey has the right to annex about 60% of Cyprus as punishment for this affront.

After centuries of colonialism, Britain partitioned Ireland in 1922, generously allowing the Irish to have a full 5/6ths of their country, only keeping one sixth for the Empire. The Republic of Ireland never accepted this and in the 1960s through 1990s the nationalist population in the north fought to end the partition. Therefore, Britain certainly has the right to now conquer at least one third of Ireland as recompense for this rejection of British goodwill.

And if that is the correct punishment for merely rejecting the violent partition of one’s homeland, surely this principle should apply double or triple when a country outright invades or takes over another country? Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, so therefore Iran is surely entitled to about half of Iraq’s territory as compensation, right? France occupied Algeria, Italy occupied Libya and so on, therefore Algeria is entitled to half of France, and Libya is entitled to half of Italy, and so on and so forth, though we start getting confused about which side is the one that should get the compensation, maybe Algeria should be punished for rejecting the humane offer of French rule by having to pay France for independence; hang on, that’s exactly what happened to the people of Haiti after all.

Of course there is no point continuing with this absurdity; so why is it so commonly accepted that only the first case is not absurd?

The data and timeline are well-known. By 1947, about one third of the population of Palestine consisted of Jews, overwhelmingly those who had immigrated as part of the Zionist program in recent decades (but including a small number of Indigenous Jews), while two-thirds were Palestinian Arabs. What is wrong with a partition being imposed on the Indigenous Palestinians by foreign imperialist and other powers? One can easily think of three objections:

1.It was not the decision of the people who lived there; the principle of self-determination says that massive life-changing ‘solutions’ should not be imposed on people by outside powerful states;

    2. It is normal for people to reject having their own country partitioned, no matter what the percentages, above all because the Palestinian people lived scattered all over Palestine, so a large part of their population would find themselves either ethnically cleansed or living under the rule of the proposed ‘Jewish state’; for the same reasons, partition was an unacceptable solution in countries like Cyprus and Bosnia, where the populations (Greek and Turkish Cypriots; Bosnian Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks [Muslims] and ‘Yugoslavs’ [mixed Bosnians]) lived scattered all over those lands.

    3. Even if they had accepted the (bad) principle of partition, why would the Palestinians accept such an unfair partition, in which the one third Jewish population were awarded 56% of the land and the two thirds Palestinian population only 43% (with one percent the city of Jerusalem)? In which Palestinians would have been a majority of the population even in the ‘Jewish state’, ie a state they would have no rights in (much the same situation likewise existed for Greek Cypriots in the ‘Turkish’ Republic of Northern Cyprus and Bosnian Muslims in the ‘Serb’ Republic in Bosnia).

      What is not widely known is that in 1946 the Arab governments had proposed an alternative plan to partition: a united democratic state where “all citizens would be represented in the guarantee of civil and political rights” where Jews would have a “permanent and secure position in the country with full participation in its political life on a footing of absolute equality with the Arabs.” The Zionist movement and its imperialist and Soviet backers rejected this in favour of a brutal and unequal partition, yet it is the Palestinians that should be punished by losing even more land.

      The Nakbah that Israel launched following (and preceding) the Palestinian rejection of partition of their land involved massive ethnic cleansing, a string of some 70 horrific massacres and and the destruction of 530 towns and villages, killing 15,000 Palestinians; the 750,000 Palestinians ethnically cleansed were never allowed to return, despite UN Resolution 194 of 1948 which demands it; they and their descendants now number nearly 10 times that figure.  

      In response to the Nakbah, a number of semi-feudal Arab states made a weak attempt to protect the ‘Arab state’ by sending in troops; the Zionist assertions that the Nakbah was ‘in response’ to this ‘Arab invasion’ are belied by simply chronology: take the most well-known event in the Nakbah, the Zionist massacre of Deir Yassin in Jerusalem (in which estimates from 107 to 254 Palestinian civilians were slaughtered) as a key example; the date was April 9, 1948; the state of Israel was declared on May 14, 1948, and only after that did the Arab armies enter to the UN-assigned ‘Arab state’. That is when Israel conquered half of that ‘Arab state’ and expanded its rule to 78 percent of Palestine (while of the remaining 22 percent, the West Bank – including East Jerusalem – went under Jordanian control and Gaza under Egyptian control, both conquered by Israel in 1967).

      While the only logical solution is a democratic state for all who live there, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Israelis, Palestinians, one person one vote, together with right of return of Palestinian refugees, the PLO program since 1948, it is the ‘two-state’ solution, whereby Israel keeps its 78% and a state of Palestine is established on the 22% ‘occupied territories’, that has international support (except the US and Israel). Since there are around 7.1 million Israeli Jews and 7.4 million Palestinians now living between the river and  the sea (not including the Palestinian refugees), this ‘two-state solution’ is manifestly unjust, yet despite this it is Israel that has always rejected it, and the Palestinian leadership which has accepted it (if combined with return of refugees to the 78% ‘Israel’ with equal rights there) since the late 1970s (as I have documented here).   

      But in reality, given the roughly equal population numbers, if there were to be a two-state rather than one-state solution (if the latter is impossible to achieve in the short-term), surely a roughly 50/50 split – something closer to the 1947 plan but improved – would be manifestly fairer. Yet the completely just and logical Palestinian rejection of partition in 1947 is today cited as a Palestinian ‘original sin’ that can never be returned to as Israel naturally had the ‘right’ to violate UN Resolution 181 by seizing 78% of Palestine with gruesome violence and terrorism. Think about – where is the logic?

      Dumb things Zionists say: 1. Gaza was no longer occupied; Israel left it to govern itself in 2005 and it responded by firing rockets at Israel

      mkaradjisLeave a comment

      by Michael Karadjis

      Israel “withdrew” from 6% of internationally-recognised Palestine, or 1.2% of historic Palestine; so small it is hard to see on a map, yet are expected to not resist the occupation of the rest of their country?

      There are a number of problems with this. The first is widely noted by pro-Palestine advocates: that Israeli “withdrawal” was accompanied by placing Gaza under a land, sea and air blockade which prevented most goods and people form getting in or out, while Israel regularly bombed the territory, every few years in major near-genocidal operations, bombed its water and power plants, left the people undernourished and with access to only unclean water, shot at Palestinian fishing boats and so on; when a country has no control over its borders because it is blockaded by its “former” occupier, it remains occupied according to international law, not to mention common sense. And of course the devastating impacts of this blockade have been widely reported, with the United Nations reporting that Gaza was “unliveable” – imagine, that is before this current holocaust.

      But there is a more fundamental reason why this is a stupid argument: Gaza is not a nation, or country or state. The nation is Palestine; the state, as recognised by the UN General Assembly and the vast majority of nations on Earth since the 1970s, covers the Palestinian territory occupied by Israel in 1967, namely West Bank and Gaza with its capital in East Jerusalem, one fifth of historic Palestine (for argument’s sake let’s leave aside for now the definition of Palestine as, well, all of Palestine, and the fact that 75 percent of ‘Gazans’ are actually refugees ethnically cleansed from ‘Israel’).  

      Now, the West Bank is 5655 square kilometres; Gaza is 365 square kilometres, meaning the internationally recognised state of Palestine is 6020 square kilometres; Gaza is therefore only around 6 percent of the Palestinian state (even though there are almost 3 million living in the West Bank and 2.3 million squeezed into Gaza). Again, let’s leave aside for now that since Israel itself is 22,770 square kilometres, Gaza is therefore only 1.2 percent of historic Palestine.

      In other words, even if we leave aside the blockade and accept the Zionist premise that Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, it therefore “withdrew” from only 6 percent of the occupied state of Palestine (or 1.2 percent of historic Palestine). So, what would we expect a people to do when the colonial occupier leaves only 6 percent of their country? Would they just say, OK, sweet, let’s just get on with it, or would they use this space to continue to resist the ongoing occupation of the rest of their country?

      Let’s imagine – in the 1950s, France had withdrawn from the town of Oran on the north Algerian coastline, and a tiny area around it, but maintained its occupation of 94 percent of Algeria. So, would the Algerians in Oran set up an independent ‘Republic of Oran’ and say stuff the rest of Algeria? Or would it have been a base for the independence struggle of the rest of Algeria? The answer is obvious. The idea that the allegedly ‘free’ Gazans would have just sat pretty while Israel continued to occupy, colonise, steal land and murder in the West Bank and Jerusalem is absurd, and offensive.

      Israel “withdrew” from Gaza, if we ignore the blockade that made life unliveable, it did not withdraw from Palestine.

      Take Ukraine. Russia is currently occupying around 20 percent of Ukraine. That means it is not occupying 80 percent of Ukraine. Putin expects Ukraine to just cop that, to sign a peace treaty allowing Russia to annex 20 percent of its land. Most people see that as self-evidently absurd and unjust. So Ukraine continues to resist. Why is it considered normal for Ukraine, 80 percent of which is unoccupied, to continue to resist Russian occupation of the 20 percent, but it is not considered normal for Palestine, in the 6 percent that was theoretically ‘unoccupied’, to continue to resist Israeli occupation of the 94 percent of Palestine?

      There is actually a third thing wrong with the statement, since it implies that Hamas simply “fired rockets” willy nilly at Israel as if Israel was doing nothing wrong; and for argument’s sake, let’s leave aside both the blockade, and the continuing occupation 94 percent of the Palestinian state, both of which mean Palestinians in Gaza have the internationally recognised right to armed resistance. What it ignores is that after “withdrawal,” Israel continued to bomb Gaza whenever it felt like it. Now, it might be a standard Zionist argument, repeated inevitably in western media, that Israel only launched such bombs “in response” to Hamas rockets, leaving aside the fact that these Israeli bombings always killed far greater numbers of Palestinian civilians than the little home-made Hamas ‘rockets’ did Israelis (they mostly killed no-one). But anyone who believes that is simply a starry-eyed victim of propaganda. Do the research – just as often it was the other way around – Israel launches some targeted assassination and kills a dozen civilian “collateral” victims, Hamas responds with rockets.

      Or, reflecting the unity of all of Palestine as noted above, Israel carries out some atrocity in the West Bank, or for example invades the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, so Hamas exercises its right to resist by launching some rockets from Gaza. Were these rockets effective, or always a good idea – perhaps not, tactics can be discussed, but when you live in a sealed-off prison you have few other options – but the idea that it was mostly Israel “responding” rather than the other way around is bald fiction.